All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

56778. 21. 4567. 1094. 467813.
Then the time and frequency for the next broadcast.
They have been at it for several months, new slips of paper arriving inside a loaf of bread every
few days, and lately Etienne plays music. Always at night and never more than a shard of song:
sixty or ninety seconds at the most. Debussy or Ravel or Massenet or Charpentier. He sets the
microphone in the bell of his electrophone, as he did years before, and lets the record spin.
Who listens? Etienne imagines shortwave receivers disguised as oatmeal boxes or tucked under
floorboards, receivers buried beneath flagstones or concealed inside bassinets. He imagines two
or three dozen listeners up and down the coast—maybe more tuning in out at sea, captain’s sets on
free ships hauling tomatoes or refugees or guns—Englishmen who expect the numbers but not the
music, who must wonder: 
Why?
Tonight he plays Vivaldi. “L’Autunno—Allegro.” A record his brother bought at a shop on the
rue Sainte-Marguerite four decades ago for fifty-five centimes.
The harpsichord plucks along, the violins make big baroque flourishes—the low, angled space
of the attic brims with sound. Beyond the slates, a block away and thirty yards below, twelve
German officers smile for cameras.
Listen to this, thinks Etienne. Hear this.
Someone touches his shoulder. He has to brace himself against the sloping wall to avoid falling
over. Marie-Laure stands behind him in her nightdress.
The violins spiral down, then back up. Etienne takes Marie-Laure’s hand and together, beneath

---

the low, sloping roof—the record spinning, the transmitter sending it over the ramparts, right
through the bodies of the Germans and out to sea—they dance. He spins her; her fingers flicker
through the air. In the candlelight, she looks of another world, her face all freckles, and in the
center of the freckles those two eyes hang unmoving like the egg cases of spiders. They do not
track him, but they do not unnerve him, either; they seem almost to see into a separate, deeper
place, a world that consists only of music.
Graceful. Lean. Coordinated as she whirls, though how she knows what dancing is, he could
never guess.
The song plays on. He lets it go too long. The antenna is still up, probably dimly visible against
the sky; the whole attic might as well shine like a beacon. But in the candlelight, in the sweet rush
of the concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow,
reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter dusks when the sun has set
but isn’t fully swallowed, and big patches of reeds catch red pools of light and burn—places he
used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago.
This, he thinks, is what the numbers mean.
The concerto ends. A wasp goes 
tap tap tap
along the ceiling. The transmitter remains on, the
microphone tucked into the bell of the electrophone as the needle traces the outermost groove.
Marie-Laure breathes heavily, smiling.
After she has gone back to sleep, after Etienne has blown out his candle, he kneels for a long
time beside his bed. The bony figure of Death rides the streets below, stopping his mount now and
then to peer into windows. Horns of fire on his head and smoke leaking from his nostrils and, in
his skeletal hand, a list newly charged with addresses. Gazing first at the crew of officers
unloading from their limousines into the château.
Then at the glowing rooms of the perfumer Claude Levitte.
Then at the dark tall house of Etienne LeBlanc.
Pass us by, Horseman. Pass this house by.

---

Sunflowers
T
hey drive a dusty track surrounded by square miles of dying sunflowers so tall that they seem like
trees. The stems have dried and stiffened, and the faces bob like praying heads, and as the Opel
bellows past, Werner feels as if they are being watched by ten thousand Cyclopic eyes. Neumann
One brakes the truck, and Bernd unslings his rifle and takes the second transceiver and wades
alone into the stalks to set it up. Werner raises the big antenna and sits in his usual spot in the box
of the Opel with his headset on.
Up in the cab, Neumann Two says, “You never scrambled her eggs, you old virgin.”
“Shut your mouth,” says Neumann One.
“You jerk yourself to sleep at night. Bleed your weasel. Pound your flounder.”
“So does half the army. Germans and Russians alike.”
“Little pubescent Aryan back there is definitely a flounder pounder.”
Over the transceiver, Bernd reads off frequencies. Nothing nothing nothing.
Neumann One says, “The true Aryan is as blond as Hitler, as slim as Göring, and as tall as
Goebbels—”
Laughter from Neumann Two. “Fuck if—”
Volkheimer says, “Enough.”
It’s late afternoon. All day they have moved through this strange and desolate region and have
seen nothing but sunflowers. Werner runs the needle through the frequencies, switches bands,
retunes the transceiver again, scouring the static. The air swarms with it day and night, a great, sad,
sinister Ukrainian static that seems to have been here long before humans figured out how to hear
it.
Volkheimer clambers out of the truck and lowers his trousers and pees into the flowers and
Werner decides to trim the aerial, but before he does, he hears—as sharp and clear and menacing
as the blade of a knife flashing in the sun—a volley of Russian.